Numbness as a Defense

Greenman continuedfrom previous page they are entirely different from Oufednik's work. It is not at all clear that he is the voice speaking in Europeana ; in fact, his dispassionate historian is more likely an alien, or at least an alien intelligence. The events of twentieth-century earth mean nothing to the book's presiding consciousness, or at least they mean nothing other than what they mean. Thus the distance, and the disjunction, and the bemusement, and the earnest, if incomplete, wisdom. A strange book about a strange century. This is the achievement of this book. It brings off a very peculiar form of genius, and it is why some will persist in classifying Europeana as a novelty rather than a novel. But there are several things here that are worth more than a passing nod and an acknowledgement of High Cleverness. For starters, there is a deeper reach into the atrocities of the Holocaust. The numbers and the statistics associated with the Nazi atrocities have been rehearsed and repeated until they no longer have meaning; the Holocaust is like a scar running through the middle of the century that has been nearly obscured by scar tissue. Oufednik recovers the pain of the Holocaust by wisely detouring into miniature but still powerful narratives: he tells of one man who goes crazy because he learns that the soap he has been using may have been constituted from his former lover, a Jew, and of another man who strangles his father rather than allow him to be shot by the Nazis. And he is up to the task, too, of illuminating some of the tighter corners of the century. The pocket history of Esperanto, with an exceedingly briefbut compelling account of the schism in the Esperantist movement, is a gem, perfect in cut and clarity. But his facility for these little moments is problematic. As it moves along, winding through the century, Europeana undermines its own method to some degree. So singular is the book's brand of comedy that it demands not only a reader's concentration but his indulgence, and a certain variety of reader may grow suspicious. Oufednik's playful if dead serious method may lead that type of reader to feel that the book, while highly truthful, does not always have the status of something true. Did Nazis really behead especially Semitic-looking men and send the heads to schools to teach children what Jews looked like? For that matter, did American soldiers really average 173 centimeters in height? This slipperiness is aided and abetted by the novel's marginal notes, light gray texts that mark each section. The notes range from the flatly factual to the gnomic, from "INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE" to "THE HORSES WERE DEAD." In mitigating his often horrific history with formal trickery, Oufednik may be practicing a form ofBrechtian alienation, but it is entirely superfluous: the rest ofthe book is alienating enough. More likely, this is a case of being caught out, of the author shying away from his novel's own grimness. The marginal headers seem like buffers, but as with all buffers, there is a question of whether or not they interfere with effectiveness. Once Oufednik's unique approach to the century begins to settle, two questions remain: does the book help to illuminate the world's recent past, and does it help to gain some purchase on the present? Part of what makes Europeana successful is that the events it investigates are all safely in the past. Oufednik began his book in 2000, and published it in the Czech Republic in the summer of2001 . "Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out," he writes early on, but there is nearly unanimous agreement that the twenty-first century started when hijackedjetliners crashed into the WorldTrade Center in September 200 1 . In his final paragraph, Oufednik jabs at Fukuyama: And in 1 989, an American political scientist invented a theory about the end of history, according to which history had actually come to an end, because modern science and new means ofcommunication allowed people to live in prosperity, and universal prosperity was the guarantee of...